stillness.

Razumov hung over, breathing the cold raw air tainted by the evil smells
of the unclean staircase. All quiet.

He went back into his room slowly, shutting the doors after him. The
peaceful steady light of his reading-lamp shone on the watch. Razumov
stood looking down at the little white dial. It wanted yet three minutes
to midnight. He took the watch into his hand fumblingly.

"Slow," he muttered, and a strange fit of nervelessness came over him.
His knees shook, the watch and chain slipped through his fingers in an
instant and fell on the floor. He was so startled that he nearly fell
himself. When at last he regained enough confidence in his limbs to
stoop for it he held it to his ear at once. After a while he growled--

"Stopped," and paused for quite a long time before he muttered sourly--

"It's done.... And now to work."

He sat down, reached haphazard for a book, opened it in middle and began
to read; but after going conscientiously over two lines he lost his hold
on the print completely and did not try to regain it. He thought--

"There was to a certainty a police agent of some sort watching the house
across the street."

He imagined him lurking in a dark gateway, goggle-eyed, muffled up in a
cloak to the nose and with a General's plumed, cocked hat on his head.
This absurdity made him start in the chair convulsively. He literally